Houserules

[DarkLink]

Ok, two questions.

1. How often does your gaming group use houserules, and on what scale. Do you write your own codices, merely smooth out an ackward rule or two, or follow GW's word to the letter.

2. How many of you know about the BoLS Homebrew Rules section? If you don't, it's all the way down at the very bottom of main forum page. Or click here (http://www.lounge.belloflostsouls.net/forumdisplay.php?f=46). I'm curious, as fairly few people post and/or discuss the home brew stuff there.


Personally, I've seen both sides of the coin. My college gaming group will rarely use Forgeworld rules, let alone house rules. On the other hand, my hometown gaming group has written and done limited playtesting on several codecies, from Necrons to Grey Knights. So, what about you guys.

[sirrouga]

I'm part of two gaming clubs.

My friendly local gaming store plays a "by the book" style; no forgeworld, no house rules, etc. I find this style great for when you play strangers or new players the majority of the time. As each week you never know who shows and with what army.

My personal group use some basic house rules, none really codex specific. Stuff like "Instant Death causes d3 wounds" is kinda what what we use. I wouldn't mind a fan made codex or even a self written one as long we can review it before hand and check it out and make sure it would fit alright. We tried to do stuff like changing rules for certain codexes but that ran into more problems that I expected. It is easier to do house rules with players you have played against consistently.

As for homebrew forums, I know they are there but don't visit them too much. That goes for more than just this site too. Sometimes they just seem to radical and unneeded a lot of the time. When I think house rules, I try to keep them as simple and short as possible so they are quick to understand. Most home brewing I seen go pages on how a Tau Fire Warrior should be a full page of special rules.

[Morgrim]

My group do mostly custom scenarios, since I play with 2 friends and we prefer all three of us on the table for a longer game than having to do 3 different battles.

We've also done some testing for custom units, often linked to scenarios. Such as an uber snotzogga (tested, amusing, but we definitely need to tweak the rules because it just didn't work) or a new DE HQ based on a beastmaster with an enhanced retinue of warpbeasts in the same vein as Uriel's grotesques.

The Death Co BoLS codex has been taken for a spin too. None of the others though, most seem power armour heavy.

[eagleboy7259]

1) Home grown missions for the most part or stuff out of previous editions. It gets a little sketchy with stuff like stop the ritual and table quarters with people building out lists for scoring units. Victory Points still work wonderfully though, I don't know why GW ever got rid of that system. The other thing we tend to allow are lists like feral orks, kroot mercs, and 13th company since GW had rules for them but chose not to use them in the modern codexes. The points and legtimacy of them isn't really an issue since the lists are newer than a couple of the codexes that are still in use right now.

2) Know about it, its nice and well thought out, never really put it into use though. Homemade lists are nice when you win against them but once you start losing people start crying cheese and that kills everybody's fun. No point in converting a unit to match some made up rules if you aren't ever going to get the chance to use it.

[Melissia]

Usually we allow forgeworld if you have rules for the unit, but that's not really a houserule-- forgeworld is an official GW subsidiary after all.

[BuFFo]

Ok, two questions.

1. How often does your gaming group use houserules, and on what scale. Do you write your own codices, merely smooth out an ackward rule or two, or follow GW's word to the letter.

My gaming group use house rules 100% of the time. Every time we use a FAQ by GW we are using a house rule.


2. How many of you know about the BoLS Homebrew Rules section? If you don't, it's all the way down at the very bottom of main forum page. Or click here (http://www.lounge.belloflostsouls.net/forumdisplay.php?f=46). I'm curious, as fairly few people post and/or discuss the home brew stuff there.

I know about it.


Personally, I've seen both sides of the coin. My college gaming group will rarely use Forgeworld rules, let alone house rules. On the other hand, my hometown gaming group has written and done limited playtesting on several codecies, from Necrons to Grey Knights. So, what about you guys.

In my area, we mainly stick to the main rule book, Codices and Erratas given to us by GW. The only time we use our own house rules is when it comes to big games, which happen every few months or so.

[Cryl]

Ok, two questions.

1. How often does your gaming group use houserules, and on what scale. Do you write your own codices, merely smooth out an ackward rule or two, or follow GW's word to the letter.

It really depends on the game to be honest, one of the guys I play with has written his own Exodite Eldar ruleset and we've played with that, other times it's pure codex with no deviation.


2. How many of you know about the BoLS Homebrew Rules section? If you don't, it's all the way down at the very bottom of main forum page. Or click here (http://www.lounge.belloflostsouls.net/forumdisplay.php?f=46). I'm curious, as fairly few people post and/or discuss the home brew stuff there.

I tend not to post much down there, the problem with homebrew rulesets like new codexes etc is that without being able to compare units on the tabletop it's very difficult to give anything more than theorycrafting opinion and when someone has spent time and effort crafting their beloved new book it's very easy on a forum to come across as telling them "your baby is ugly"... sure you can argue that they're really asking for you to tell them that and how can they improve it if you don't but it's too subjective without playtest evidence for me

[Wolfshade]

I suppose my firneds and I play a number of house rules, generally these are when occassions have cropt up in a game and the GW rules don't quite cover the situation. We disucss the issue from a number of view points for and against a certain interpretation and from a fluff point (RAI?). We then continue to use these when we play in the future to have a consistent rulings. A number of them we about line of sight which was sorted using 5th ed rules. But some still exist like the bases of buildings if they count as normal terrain or difficult terrain.

Then we try somethings out like playing with modified force org charts. Generally though we try and play within the spirit of the rules as written. This could be a reflection of the lack of time we have to play (one game a month if we are lucky)

[RocketRollRebel]

My old gaming group didn't really play with house rules much but we did talk about using the BoLS mini-dex's to build armies around. My new gaming group has a lot of people with Forge World stuff so I've seen a bunch of FW units rolling (or flying) around the table top.

[Col.Gravis]

My gaming group use House Rules reasonably regularly, custom scenario's are sometimes used, most commonly with campaigns which also tend to use limitations and variations on the standard rules, we use BoLS rules occasionally mostly for Apoc Super Heavies such as my Leviathan. For a comming campaign after christmas we've also got a chap who's play testing a Squat codex at the moment which seems to be going pretty well with input from the gaming group as a whole, I'm play testing some variations on Plague Zombies and theres ongoing discussion on making some changes to the Necrons special rules for the campaign to make them a more viable option for smaller games and changing mechanics such as we'll be back with USR's.

[Lerra]

We generally stick to RAW plus the Adepticon FAQ. I've got an Imperial Armour Tau army that I'm trying to convince people to allow, but it's going to be iffy.

We do have "gaming culture" style house rules. Ex: What do you do when you're in the middle of the shooting phase and you realize that you forgot to roll for reserves?

[murrburger]

We play with the main books and the Adepticon FAQ. I dislike FW things in normal games as, despite what they say, things simply aren't balanced. I have a balanced list, and I want the game to be a bit more tactical than "There's the Titan... bring lots of melta and KILL IT!"

Games of Apoc, however, are great for FW stuff. It's nice to unwind and have a sort of 'anything goes' sort of affair where multiple people can play. In fact, we even do non-apoc team battles a lot of the time. Usually 2v2 or 3v3 at 2000 points a player.

[Nabterayl]

We allow Imperial Armour stuff with the following exceptions:
No gargantuan creatures
Nothing with structure points
No flyers
Nothing that can fling a Hellstorm, 7", or 10" template
Nothing with a Destroyer weapon
We also add the army's Strategy Rating to the d6 roll to determine who gets pick of deployment/first turn. We've gone back and forth on house ruling the squadron damage rules.

[DarkLink]

Something I thought up, and we tried once, was modifying Rapid Fire weapons. We changed it to "Rapid Fire weapons may either fire as a Heavy 2 or Assault 1 weapon with X range".

It was a blast. With a bunch of Sisters and Tactical Marines on the board, it felt like bullets were flying all over the place. The only unforeseen consequence was that it made my opponent's LR Crusader absolutely devastating. Other than that, though, I like the rules a whole lot more than the current Rapid Fire rules.

[Morgrim]

Modifed slave raid is surprisingly fun. Sure, I get less points than either the SM or ork players, but coming in from reserve, swooping down and snatching a few models from combat, and hightailing it out of there is a blast for all involved.

Although we should probably stop making unoffical alliances and going after the ork player. And it turns out BA get annoyed if you ignore the tactical marines and kidnap half the Death Co, mostly in a 'how the hell did you do that!?' type manner.

Granted, never finished a game with more than one raider and a troop choice still on the table...

[sirrouga]

On an other note, has anyone played around with the mission rules made the people at Dice Like Thunder? A few friends of mine are looking into them and wanting to try some out so I like to know what other people think about them.

The missions are located here for those not familiar with them...
http://dicelikethunder.com/files/DLTMissions.pdf

[Subject Keyword]

My friends and I play with a lot of custom rules.
We have one variant where there's a massive doom-cannon in the middle of the field dropping apocalypse templates of fire and brimstone in random directions every turn, and another one with a nigh-indestructible mutant plant that can disembowel anything within reach that must first be killed before its seed pods turn into objectives that have to be carries off the field. The latter is called the "freakin' huge shop of Horrors."


As for home-brewed units, they must undergo intense playtesting before being voted into our big, collective book of "This is awesome and we'll let you use it."

[DarkLink]

My friends and I play with a lot of custom rules.
We have one variant where there's a massive doom-cannon in the middle of the field dropping apocalypse templates of fire and brimstone in random directions every turn, and another one with a nigh-indestructible mutant plant that can disembowel anything within reach that must first be killed before its seed pods turn into objectives that have to be carries off the field. The latter is called the "freakin' huge shop of Horrors."


As for home-brewed units, they must undergo intense playtesting before being voted into our big, collective book of "This is awesome and we'll let you use it."

Sounds like Lord Krugal Hawklight. He shows up when the game starts lasting too long, and throws terrain pieces at your models to make the game go faster. My hometown group can be... interesting sometimes.

[Magos]

I am rather a big fan of Houserules, as they can certainly make a game slightly more interesting. Our play group is also rather forgiving of proxies/coversions of non-gw stuff, but Im not sure if thats really in the same catagory.

[SombreBrotherhood]

My primary gaming partner and I have generally agreed to let all SM equipment/wargear be the same across codices. Absolutely no reason why Deathwing Cyclone launchers and Storm Shields should be lamed when their counterparts are falling in line with C:SM. We recently finished a mini campaign full of scratch-built scenarios and rules. it's pretty fun!

[Duke]

Ok, two questions.

1. How often does your gaming group use houserules, and on what scale. Do you write your own codices, merely smooth out an ackward rule or two, or follow GW's word to the letter.

2. How many of you know about the BoLS Homebrew Rules section? If you don't, it's all the way down at the very bottom of main forum page. Or click here (http://www.lounge.belloflostsouls.net/forumdisplay.php?f=46). I'm curious, as fairly few people post and/or discuss the home brew stuff there.


Personally, I've seen both sides of the coin. My college gaming group will rarely use Forgeworld rules, let alone house rules. On the other hand, my hometown gaming group has written and done limited playtesting on several codecies, from Necrons to Grey Knights. So, what about you guys.

1. My gaming group/club is "by the book, RAW" for normal games and tournies/ Campaigns. However, we have edited/ added rules to the Expansions (mostly Apoc). For example, we have made a "Strong suggestion," that Apoc games have a Refferre who isn't playing. Also, you can only have one more st D weapon that your opponenet. Any St D over the extra one is downgraded to st 10 ap1. Also, we try to balance Superheavies and titans.

2. I didn't know about that portion of the forum... I usually haunt the 40k section only, lol. Ill have to check it out though.


Just a note: I think that all normal games of 40k should not be tricked with or added to when played in a public area. If your playing one friend all the time in your living room then have at it, but people should be able to walk in off the street and not have to learn all the FLGS house rules. It is hard enough to get the actual rules straight! lol

Duke

[Melissia]

Not to say I don't make houserules. I make houserules, new units, etc, as simple mental exercise with no real intent on using them.

[Subject Keyword]

Has anyone here ever fought the "movie marines?"
They sound pretty cool.

A certain person who goes to a certain Hippy College who is on this forum should have that battle with me...

[DarkLink]

Has anyone here ever fought the "movie marines?"
They sound pretty cool.

A certain person who goes to a certain Hippy College who is on this forum should have that battle with me...

I did make up a Movie Grey Knight list, based around the fluff that a Grey Knight terminator is a Librarian-level psyker and warrior. So each Terminator was about 100pts and had a Librarian statline. I also made a huge list of like 15 psychic powers broken up into 3 "levels". Justicars and Terminators could take Level 1 powers, Brother Captains could take Level 1 or 2 powers, and Grand Masters could take Level 3 powers. The Grand Master was like, 300pts base.

Also, the basic Grey Knight was 50pts, base. All the Grey Knight special rules were massively buffed, everyone could deepstrike, had all sorts of awesome psychic powers and such. A 1000pt army could have 8 basic Grey Knights and a Brother Captain, and it didn't look like a list I would want to face in an actual game.

It was pretty awesome:D. Never played with it, though.

[therealjohnny5]

we will for terrain or special scenario rules, unfortunately the guys i play with are very win oriented so i don't get much opportunity for FW or unique rules...kinda sucks since i play RG...they don't warm up to the idea of anything giving anyone else an "unfair" advantage...i've got two deathstorm drop pods for my RG army since they aren't a HS army in fluff, i thought they'd serve as a solid replacement fluff wise and ran them in one game. then they both banned me from playing them...se la vive...